‘The City got hold of me, drawing me in... For fourteen months I had enjoyed sinking deep into its folds, becoming an inter-dealer bond broker, and taking all that it had to offer as I bobbed around: the eight course tasting menus, the ?00 bottles of wine, the Champagne fuelled nights at strip clubs, the Chanel handbags, the meaningless sex, the friendships. And then as easily as I had slipped in, I was catapulted back out. There were no pristine cardboard boxes to aid my transfer back to society; no emotional leaving drinks, no desperate calls to headhunters. I had just sat on a bench for a while, another nameless suit absentmindedly fiddling with a Blackberry. Then I got on the tube and made my journey home away from the ivory towers of Canary Wharf for the last time’

GROSS MISCONDUCT takes you inside the city through 23-year-old Venetia Thompson’s eyes as she spent a rollercoaster twelve months learning her trade as a broker before being spat out at the other end when she wrote an article for The Spectator that spilled the beans on the whole culture of excess. Her sacking made the front pages of the Daily Telegraph – a ripple on the financial pond at the time, but one which has become a wave in recent months, as the banking world has been shaken to its foundations. Her position is by no means unique, but her extraordinary eye for detail, her youthful female perspective and her winning prose make her account an intriguing, candid, non-fiction snapshot of the last period of unchecked excess before banking culture and the City changed forever.

Venetia Thompson is 24. She grew up in rural South Devon before escaping for London where she studied Russian at UCL. Despite always having wanted to pursue a writing career, she was drawn to the City and in November 2006 took a job as an inter-dealer bond broker at one of finance's most notoriously aggressive, male-dominated firms, where she worked for fourteen months, fully embracing the lifestyle and all that the job offered. In February 2008 she was fired for gross misconduct following her first attempt at an article, written after a particularly difficult few weeks, getting published by The Spectator. She is now a regular contributor to the magazine, and has written on a wide range of current affairs- and social trend-related topics, as well as for the Telegraph. She lives in London.